“Sergen Şehitoğlu’s series Kill Memories comprises images captured from a computer screen. These images belong to a young woman who comes into contact with her customers via webcam. This series, in an era when social media draws us in and even swallows us up, seeks to invert the status of the woman who forms a ‘relationship’ in this milieu as object of desire by letting the viewer only see her face. As we respond, in Levinas’s words, to the “call of the face”, she stands firm before us in all her fragility and power. Thus, the face that cannot be reduced to “a symbol like all others” shatters the order of the world.

Portraits “taken” at different times present a blurred image of the face, and refer to Thomas Ruff’s 2003 series “Nudes”. Ruff, using Geoff Dyer’s phrase, “lyricized” the images he took from porn sites by blurring them; while Şehitoğlu applies the same strategy to portraits he retrieves from video images.”